The present disclosure, for example, relates to wireless communication systems, and more particularly to wireless communications involving a vehicular communication network.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
By way of example, a wireless multiple-access communication system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, otherwise known as user equipments (UEs). A base station may communicate with UEs on downlink channels (e.g., for transmissions from a base station to a UE) and uplink channels (e.g., for transmissions from a UE to a base station).
An additional example may include wireless communications between mobile vehicles (vehicular networking) or on other mobile networks having devices capable of physical movement which may be used for data delivery and content sharing. One example standard that may be used for mobile networks such as vehicular networking is the IEEE 802.11p protocol for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). The 802.11p protocol includes allocated channels for safety services as well as for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and navigation software updates. Using this protocol, mobile networks could also be used to deliver delay-tolerant data transfers. Applications could include delivering high-quality videos to households, uploading large volumes of data created by businesses to cloud computing clusters, or transferring data between data centers at different geographical locations. A mobile network such as a vehicular communication network could also be used as a post-disaster communication network as an alternative to other communication networks.
Communications are typically broadcast within a mobile network such as a vehicular communication network. Even when a message or data packet is meant to be delivered from a source to a specific destination (a so-called unicast use case), the data packet is still broadcast, meaning that individual vehicles may be required to decide whether a received data packet meant for a different destination should be stored, deleted or forwarded. In some cases, data packets may be deleted by the vehicle instead of being stored or forwarded.